Town note
Cooperstown is the county seat of Griggs County, in east central North Dakota; the whole county has about 2,400 people.
about 0:08:25The story
Cooperstown, North Dakota, is a tiny town of 0.97 square miles in the east central part of the state, the county seat of Griggs County, about an hour and a half from Fargo and two and a half hours from Bismarck. It is not the New York town with the Baseball Hall of Fame. Griggs County was settled in 1879 and organised in 1880, and at one point men from the town of Hope took the county records from Cooperstown at gunpoint to claim the county seat, which was settled by splitting off Steele County. The population peaked at almost 1,500 in the 1960s and was 945 in 2010, with a median age of 51.3. The town is about 99 percent white, 62 percent of people are religious, and it has seven churches. Its slogan is unlimited possibilities.
Kurt Douglas Johnson grew up on a farm near Cooperstown and graduated from high school there in 1974. He earned a degree in construction management at North Dakota State University, spent nine years as a senior engineer with the state Department of Transportation in Bismarck, then worked in Champaign, Illinois, and for ten years in Falls Church, Virginia, as a pavement engineering project manager. After his divorce in 2003 he returned to Cooperstown, where he worked as a transportation research engineer for the Upper Great Plains Transportation Institute, mentored students at his old university, hunted, gardened, volunteered at his church and the Bible camp, and had three grown children.
He worked as a welder and was known as Machine Gun Head for a machine gun tattoo by his ear, and he also had swastika and SS tattoos. He had served two years in the Marines from 1997 to 1999 and had a long California record including burglary, firearms offences and drug possession, with an outstanding probation violation warrant.
Bartender Carrie Sad said Johnson was not intoxicated when he arrived, but after the two went into the bathroom together he returned extremely drunk and fell off his stool. Johnson's phone had been powered down at one minute past midnight.
When Johnson did not reappear, his cousin Murray Stacca reported him missing to Sheriff Robert Hook on January 4th. The snow removal man had seen no footprints at Johnson's house. Searches turned up spent shells, a gunpowder and marbles canister with a fuse, and a bloodstained couch cushion in a garbage bag. A second warrant led to muddy boots and coveralls in the basement and, 18 inches down in the crawl space, Johnson's head wrapped in plastic bags with fabric softener sheets. DNA and dental records identified him, and a nine millimetre bullet fragment was in the skull. He had been shot once in the forehead and decapitated after death. The body was never found, and the search was called off on July 8th, 2011.
Defence attorney Stephen Mottinger argued there were no witnesses and other possibilities. He was taken to the penitentiary in Bismarck.
The town was shaken by the first murder in 80 years, and Spar said doors were locked that had not been before. Carrie Sad told a reporter in 2017 that she took it very hard and for a long time felt it was her fault.